RICKY’S HISTORY ABOUT ADDICTS AND ALCOHOLISM

Ricky lives in a small flat in one of London's high-rise blocks. It is decorated with

American-Indian objects, patterned rugs and several houseplants. He is thirty-eight years old, born and bred in London, and has never been married. Indeed, his background is one of deprivation and difficulties. He was brought up in a children's home and was in trouble with the law by the time he was eight. At the age of fifteen he was given a suitcase and a bank book containing £10, and thrown out of the children's home.

He doesn't blame his addiction on his background. 'It doesn't make me different. I think in a lot of ways I was better off. I had a lot of brothers and sisters.'

What is remarkable, however, is how Ricky managed to recover without any of the help that money or class connections can give. He beat his drug addiction the hard way - but he succeeded. Today, he has been clean and sober for six years.

He started drinking and taking drugs as a teenager, using amphetamines, 'which I really enjoyed. I used to see heroin addicts, and I used to think "No, I'll never end up like that." '

Then, with a girlfriend, he moved into a house where some heroin addicts lived in the

top-floor flat. They were getting heroin from a doctor who freely prescribed what addicts wanted. 'So for a while I was skin-popping heroin. It was just like amphetamines except that you got a bigger effect and it lasted a lot longer and, amazingly enough, you didn't come down.'

Using a needle to mainline the drugs into his veins followed a few months later. 'Within a year I was heavily addicted to heroin and I was mainlining. I started injecting a lot, at least four to six times a day.'

When he was twenty, Ricky had his first treatment in a National Health Service

drug-dependence unit. He had a fix before he turned up to see the doctor, who asked him what he was taking. Ricky told him a huge amount of heroin.

At this point Ricky realised he was not going to be admitted to the hospital, but just registered as an addict. The doctor simply wrote out a prescription for heroin with methadone. 'He gave me the amount I said I took. I injected it and I was acting quite normally in front of him so I got a very, very big script. But of course you don't really sort of last long on it. You never go by the book with it, you know.

'On methadone it's like you're walking around in a sleep, in a daze, because you're just existing. You talk to most addicts - all they live for is the chemist in the morning, when they can get their methadone. It never works anyway.'

In theory, the doctor was going to cut down over the weeks the amount of drugs Ricky was taking. But Ricky never kept his appointments, and one Saturday-he turned up to find that the doctor had not left a prescription for him. 'So I had a big row with him and that was the end of being with him.'

His life became a series of encounters with the police. T did all the usual things, the street things, like robberies and God knows what else for drugs. I was crazy.' Often he had to go through cold-turkey withdrawal in a police cell.

At the age of twenty-one he served his first prison sentence. When he came out he tried to stay off drugs: 'I tried for three weeks. I felt really vulnerable. I didn't know whether I was coming or going. I didn't fit in anywhere. I didn't know what to do.'

The only way he knew how to cope was to use drugs again. In 1972 he got himself

re-registered as an addict, while he was on the run from the police. T was barred from certain hospitals because I was known as a violent, unpredictable addict. I got put into this hospital because I had an abscess on my arm and it was getting so bad that they were thinking of taking my arm off.' He was given methadone there, then passed on to another hospital which gave him heroin again. 'I thought, "That's crazy. Right now I'm on methadone and now they're going to register me for heroin", which they did. Only this time they had got wiser. They were cutting me down very quickly.'

Like other addicts, Ricky supplemented his prescription with heroin bought on the street. 'They didn't know that, but they know that most addicts do it anyway.'

That year he was arrested for possession of black-market heroin and was given a prison sentence of eighteen months. 'That's when I took a good look at myself. A lot of people were dying and that frightened me. And also, with heroin, like any drug, you get so far with it and you don't get high any more. So I was fed up with that.'

When he came out of prison, Ricky went to a unit for drug addicts. 'It was the kind of place where you scream and shout at each other. I went through all that. But it was a protected environment. As soon as I got out on the streets and started living I felt those old feelings come back and I didn't know what to do. I just followed those feelings.'

The unit had told him it was all right to drink, so he drowned the feelings with alcohol rather than drugs. 'I didn't believe that I would get hung up on alcohol, but I did. I ended up for about five years living on park benches going insaner and insaner and insaner.'

He was in and out of prison on drunk-and-disorderly charges. One of the magistrates he appeared before gave him the number of Alcoholics Anonymous, but Ricky didn't want to know.

It was his mother, whom he hadn't known as a child, who got through to him. She turned up in his life, together with brothers and sisters, and Ricky spent several weekends with her. 'I was leading a double life. They didn't know I was sleeping rough in parks.'

One weekend his mother told him, 'If you come back any drunker we won't let you in.' Nothing that Ricky had gone through - the beatings, police cells, prisons or hospitals - had got through to him. But that weekend his mother did. He went to a pub, cried for hours, then rang up the Samaritans. They suggested Alcoholics Anonymous. Ricky rang AA and a man came out to visit him. 'He travelled several miles to see me. I respected that.'

Ricky stopped drinking. He walked five miles to his nearest Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, picking up cigarette ends on the way. 'I was beaten, in the face, in the arm, through fighting. I said to them, "Well, I'm here. I'm not drinking. But I used to be a heroin addict." '

For the next three months he went to an AA meeting every day. The only thing that distressed him was that there was no chance to talk about his drug addiction. Then he went to an A A meeting and heard people talk about being glad to be sober, and he thought: 'Do I have to take all this?' He told them how he felt and went straight round to the pub and got drunk.

That was his last drink. Since then he has never taken any drug - neither illegal drugs nor prescribed drugs like tranquillisers. A few months later, he heard Harry talking at an AA meeting about being both an alcoholic and an addict, and when Narcotics Anonymous started up in London he went to their meetings.

Ricky started getting involved in NA and in helping addicts get off drugs. He went back to the magistrate who had told him about Alcoholics Anonymous and told him about the existence of Narcotics Anonymous. They had dinner together. He went back to the clinic where he had been treated, and told the doctor there how he was staying off drugs with the help of NA. He even went as an NA delegate to the United States NA Conference - getting a US visa with difficulty, because of his criminal record.

'I learned a lot in NA. I learned to grow up. I didn't know before, but I was pretty immature. I had a chip on my shoulder. Today I haven't got that, or I hope I haven't. I try and be gentle. I try and be loving.

'For me, going to that conference was the impossible dream. It proved that NA works. I was written down as a hopeless case,' says Ricky. T came from the gutter. By the end there wasn't a treatment centre that would have me - but Narcotics Anonymous did.'

You may say to yourself 'I'm not that bad, because I never went to prison.' Or you may feel you are different because you do not use drugs in exactly the same way, or you do not use exactly the same combination of drugs. Or perhaps you are an alcoholic who has never used illegal drugs at all.

All drug addicts and alcoholics are slightly different, just as all individuals are. But what they have in common are the feelings they experience as drug and alcohol dependence tightens its grip on them.

Others who read the stories above may be surprised to discover how the addicts were usually taking not just one but several drugs. They may also be surprised to discover that alcohol played a part in their addiction.

But these stories reflect a basic truth - drug dependence is not a tidy illness. Most addicts will use whatever drug is available, falling back on alcohol or prescribed drugs if they cannot get the drug they like best. We believe that drug dependence and alcoholism are all part of the same illness, which we call chemical dependence.

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